01-Apr-2007
Sticking Points
Many years ago I heard a news story about a crime. The crime, while awful enough, wasn’t much different from many other crimes I might have heard about at the time. Yet for no good reason it began to eat away at me – emphasis here on no good reason. Odd, bizarre, and even horrific events hit us all the time and, for the most part, fade from our minds about as quickly as the news reports. What causes one to “stick” while another slides away is its own mystery.
The name of the crime victim, by the way, was Katherine Hegarty. I wrote a novel about her to try to unstick myself from her story. The novel was a success, but Katherine still haunts me.
I mention this because it has happened again. Her name was Bridget DeCleene. On a Sunday morning early last month Bridget was murdered two blocks from my home.
The scene of the crime is an old factory neighborhood with several of the old factories already torn down while the remainder are used by a moving company and a landscaping company. Only two houses were on that block, with the house where Bridget was killed sitting next to a major electrical power grid. The bottom floor of the house was being used for some kind of industrial storage, while the second floor was living quarters for a man lots of people knew, but about whom not many people knew much.
His name was Robert Bevington and he was 63 years old. Bridget was 21.
The only public record for Mr. Bevington had him addressing a Sycamore city council meeting back in August of 2000. Apparently he had some concerns about neighborhood transients on the street where he lived, which was also the street where he and Bridget died. In the published news reports there were a few comments about him from patrons of a restaurant he frequented, but most of those were hearsay of the worst sort and not very informative. Beyond the news stories, there is no mention of his death in any media. His obituary mentioned his three children, but there was nothing indicating that he had ever been married. Perhaps he had been, but his wife wanted no linking of his name to hers.
Bridget DeCleene had in some way befriended Mr. Bevington, something that would have been much in line with her character. As an aunt of hers was quoted as saying, “She was a caregiver and always trying to help people.”
Whatever the relationship was, and there were early reports of a romantic relationship, those reports pretty quickly quashed by her boyfriend, Antonio de la Fuente, the befriending was rewarded by Bevington’s stalking Bridget for some two years, enough so that her family moved out of town to put an end to it.
Bridget’s father, Dan DeCleene, in the Daily Chronicle in DeKalb (five miles from here), said, “She was taken advantage of because of her giving nature. There was no romance whatsoever. He manipulated her and lied to her. We moved out of Sycamore to get away from him.”
That Saturday night in early March Bridget was to attend a wedding in Aurora, about thirty miles from Sycamore. Her car was found in the same town in a remote parking lot at the YMCA. That Sunday morning at around three A.M., however, in Sycamore, Bevington shot Bridget twice in the head, started his car and house on fire, and then killed himself. A shotgun was found near Bevington’s body.
That “sticking,” though, is a puzzling thing. Ironically, just a couple of weeks before Bridget’s murder, another murder-suicide took place in DeKalb, the people, the details, the circumstances of which I couldn’t begin to tell you. Equally horrific, no doubt; equally sad and tragic, yet it didn’t make the cut. Bridget did.
Perhaps it’s because so many questions are still on the table, questions that can never be answered – at least not by reporters, friends and family, or police investigators. Perhaps it was the proximity to my home that makes it unique among unique events, although the case I mentioned above, that of Katherine Hegarty, happened hundreds of miles from my home at the time.
Perhaps it’s just that, for as much as we are bombarded by odd, cruel, and ghastly events virtually all the time, now and then something is simply forced to the surface – a release, possibly, a pressure valve for the horrendous. In no way can you digest it all, so here, take this one. Turn it over, study it, mourn it, be saddened by it. Do this at least once in awhile so that not every single act of our inhumanity is consigned to the bin of the forgotten.
I’ve never written about this sort of thing before, about that moment when a seed gets planted but you have no idea what it is or what it might grow into. On the one hand, a part of me revolts and wants to say, There’s a difference between tragedy and material. But the other side of that, the most obvious side, wants to say, Don’t be ridiculous. It’s all material, every last ghastly, heartbreaking, joyful, wondrous, perverse, inspiring, disgusting bit of it.
While others might recoil and drop it and forget about it, the writer has no such privilege. It is up to him or her to stare at it all head-on – assimilate the pain, flip the consequences, mourn with the mourners, chew on the bitter facts, then somehow put it into a package that says, This is how it was. This we understand.
G. K. Wuori © 2007
Photo from The Daily Chronicle, DeKalb, Illinois
